China has increased its investment in its homegrown Godson microprocessor
in the hopes of building its first petaflop-class supercomputer in 2010,
says one of China's senior engineers. Although China trails its
international rivals in chip development, it is making a strong effort to
catch up, says Zhiwei Xu, CTO of the Institute of Computing Technology and
the Chinese Academy of Sciences. China has produced four Godson
processors, and last year China reached an agreement with
STMicroelectronics to manufacture and sell the chips, which are now used by
40 companies in set-top boxes, laptops, and other products, Xu says. Next
month, China will complete the design for a new version of the chip, called
Godson 2g, that offers more functionality. China also plans to be able to
integrate graphics capabilities on the same silicon as the main processor,
similar to current AMD and Intel products, sometime next year. Meanwhile,
China is working on the Godson 3, its first multi-core chip, which the
country hopes will allow it to build a high-performance computer in 2010
with a processing speed of 1 petaflop per second, matching the speed of the
world's current fastest computers.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Investigators at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab are monitoring
the use of cyber attacks in international warfare. While many of the
investigators joined the Citizen Lab to help residents in countries that
censor online content, the evolving demands of the Internet have shifted
their focus to cyber attacks, how traffic is routed through countries,
where Web sites are blocked, and how Internet traffic patterns form. The
Citizen Lab started as a collaborative effort with Harvard Law School and
Cambridge and Oxford universities to track patterns of Internet censorship
in countries that use filters. Citizen Lab researchers developed a
software tool called Psiphon to help users bypass such Internet filters.
However, over the past year the researchers have had to increase their
efforts to gather evidence on Internet assaults, as online attacks are
becoming increasingly important to military strategies and political
struggles. Before Russia invaded Georgia in early August, the Citizen Lab
noticed sporadic attacks aimed at several Georgian Web sites. Such attacks
would be particularly effective against countries that rely on critical
online activities such as online banking. After the ground war started,
massive raids on Georgia's Internet infrastructure were deployed using
techniques similar to those used by Russian criminal organizations, which
was followed by attacks from individuals who found online instructions for
launching their own attacks, crippling much of Georgia's communication
systems. Weeks later, researchers are still trying to find the origin of
the attacks.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The jump to multicore processing is not based on a breakthrough in
programming or architecture, but rather a retreat from the harder task of
building power-efficient, high-clock-rate, single-core chips, writes former
ACM president David Patterson, professor of computer science at the
University of California, Berkeley. Numerous startup companies have tried
to commercialize multiple-core hardware over the past few years only to be
met with failure as programmers accustomed to improvements in sequential
performance failed to adopt parallelism. If researchers manage to meet the
parallel challenge, the future of IT will most likely be prosperous, but if
not, failure could jeopardize both the IT industry and sections of the
economy that depend on the rapid improvement of information technology.
Such a failure could also provide an opportunity for the leaders in IT to
move from the U.S. to wherever someone finds the solutions to writing
efficient, parallel software. With such a crisis looming on the horizon,
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's choice to decrease funding
for academic research in computer systems research since 2001 is troubling,
Patterson writes. The lack of government support has driven industry to
fund academic research efforts. Research efforts at Berkeley, Stanford
University, and the University of Illinois are being funded by private
industry, but it is unlikely private companies will spend more resources on
such projects. Patterson argues that the U.S. government needs to return
to its historic role of uniting great minds to solve important problems.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Fraunhofer FOKUS has developed a new platform that will allow mobile phone
users to take advantage of Web services and enable Web users to gain
telephony functions. At IFA 2008, Fraunhofer FOKUS demonstrated "Mobile
Car Sharing" and "Location-based Digital Notepads" as model applications
for Mobile Widget Runtime. The platform for mobile Web 2.0 offers shared
user experience, mobility, and location-dependency as key features, and Web
2.0 services can be quickly implemented and easily changed, says Fraunhofer
Institute FOKUS researcher David Linner. Users do not need permanent
Internet connectivity to access the services provided by Web applications.
For example, Web applications will be able to use Bluetooth, satellite
navigation, MMS, instant messaging, and telephone conferencing. Mobile
Widget Runtime can serve as a standalone platform for complete
applications, or can be used with existing applications to extend them
further, even without knowing all the technical information about the base
application.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Last year, professors at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute
launched Robot 250, a community outreach program to get residents more
involved and interested in robotics. About 500 local Pittsburgh residents
are now involved with the program as amateur robot designers. Many of the
community roboticists focused on everyday problems. For example,
participants designed a robot to take photos of speeding cars, one that
waves its arms when street noise gets too loud, a robotic sheep designed to
be a novelty lawnmower, and robot flags that raise and lower automatically.
Some of the robots are designed for even less purposeful tasks, such as a
robotic handmade of carved cucumbers and cheese that flexes whenever
someone claps or laughs near the device. Another project, a robotic Rice
Krispies Treats man, pivots whenever the lights are dimmed. The year-long
program coincides with Pittsburgh's 250th birthday. University professors
visited 13 neighborhoods to distribute materials, instructions, and
troubleshooting advice. "We wanted to put technology into the hands of as
many people as possible," says Robotics Institute professor Illah
Nourbakhsh, who came up with the Robot 250 concept. Participants built
about 75 robots, ranging from small paper flowers with buds that opened and
closed, to a working wooden roller coaster. Many of the robots were on
display at the Robot 250 block party, which was hailed as the city's
largest and most diverse public gathering of robots.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Technology Review magazine
has named Singaporean biochemist Victor Tong one of the top 35 young
innovators in science and technology for developing computer models that
have the potential to usher in an age of personalized medicine. Tong, who
is also trained in computer science, worked with computer scientists,
virologists, and chemists to map how the different genetic makeups of
people can impact how they react to viruses. The computer models have a 90
percent accuracy rate of identifying the correct method for creating an
immune response. The research means that people who do not respond to a
certain vaccine could quickly have an alternative that is based on their
genetic code. Tong was trained in Singapore and works at the Institute of
Infocomm Research under the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research.
He always loved computer games and programming, and saw the SARS outbreak
as an opportunity to merge those interests with biology. "SARS made me
think about how I could make the maximum impact to improve people's lives,"
Tong says.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Eavesdropping via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is no longer a theoretical
vulnerability, as demonstrated by security researchers Anton Kapela and
Alex Pilosov at the recent DefCon hacker conference. They unveiled a
method that exploited the protocol so that they could silently monitor and
intercept unencrypted Internet traffic bound for the conference network and
reroute it to a system they controlled, and it is feared that this tactic
could be used to commit corporate espionage, nation-state surveillance, and
data mining by intelligence agencies without the need for ISP cooperation.
Kapela said the security hole is not an actual software bug or protocol
error, but rather a flaw that stems from "the level of interconnectivity
that's needed to maintain this mess, to keep it all working." BGP's
trust-based architecture makes the protocol vulnerable to claims from
unfriendly routers that they are trustworthy, and Pilosov and Kapela have
eliminated the outages such hijacks typically generate by forwarding the
intercepted data surreptitiously to the actual destination. To prevent the
data from boomeranging back to the attacker, the researchers employ
Autonomous System (AS) path prepending that causes a chosen number of BGP
routers to reject their deceptive advertisement, and then use these ASes to
route the captured data to the appropriate recipients. Kapela noted that
ISPs could prevent BGP eavesdropping by aggressively filtering to permit
only authorized peers to draw traffic from their routers, and only for
particular IP prefixes. The problem lies in the enormous amount of work
this would entail, and the unaffordable cost of performing such filtering
on a global scale. Douglas Maughan with the Department of Homeland
Security's Science and Technology Directorate concluded that "the only
thing that can force [ISPs to fix BGP] is if their customers ... start to
demand security solutions."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

New research that has the potential to improve online mapping services was
recently presented at ACM's SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. The latest
mapping services can overwhelm users with the amount of information they
are able to provide, but a team at the University of California, Berkeley
has developed software than can generate personalized maps and essential
information. The present version of the software is based on San
Francisco, and displays some of the more notable cultural, visual, and
structural landmarks throughout the city. The software can display a
straight-forward three-dimensional depiction of a landmark. For more
information, the software can generate an oblique projection that shows all
visible sides of the landmark, which will appear distorted. And roads have
been widened so that the streets remain visible. Also, users can choose a
purpose such as shopping to generate more shops, or food to focus more on
restaurants.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The European Union-funded WINSOC project is working to find ways of
organizing wireless sensor networks to make them more durable and prevent
problems such as node failures and large-scale traffic jams. WINSOC, which
involves researchers in Europe and India, is unique in that it draws from
discoveries made while studying living organisms to help develop
self-organizing networks of wireless sensors. "Living systems are
intrinsically robust against cells dying or being damaged," says WINSOC's
scientific coordinator Sergio Barbarossa of the University of Rome. "The
behavior of most organs is an emerging feature, resulting from the
interaction of many cells, where no cell is particularly robust or even
aware of the whole behavior." Barbarossa says the starting point in the
WINSOC project was to provide mathematical models of biological systems and
translate those models into algorithms that could be used to determine how
the sensor nodes should interact with each other. A prototype sensor node
is under development, but the main challenge is to make the network able to
sustain operations even when several sensors fail. WINSOC's approach is to
have sensor nodes communicate with each other to create a consensus on what
data is being recorded. The network then finds the best path through
available nodes to relay information to a control center. A prototype
network of geological sensors has been installed in the Idduki rainforest
of Kerala, India, to detect landslides during the monsoon season.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Internet researcher and industry entrepreneur Judy Estrin has written
"Closing the Innovation Gap," a book in which she warns that the
environment for innovation in Silicon Valley and the United States as a
whole has taken a turn for the worse. Estrin says that an overemphasis on
short-term growth, quick fixes, and fast profits has diluted the curiosity
and patience that leads to true innovation and the potential for future
economic growth. She argues that corporate financial pressures and less
government funding have undermined support for the forward-looking research
that leads to innovative and revolutionary products. Estrin says that just
as trees need good soil and climate to create healthy forests, startup
companies and research efforts need a strong network to foster innovation.
"What happens to trees is root rot in which the leaves and branches look
fine for a while until the tree topples over and dies," she says. "We've
already got the root rot." Estrin says the U.S. should focus on
Sputnik-like challenges, such as creating energy or reducing energy
consumption, understanding climate change, improving health care, and
improving personal and national security. Achieving these goals will
require more than money, she says, and will demand an understanding of the
intangible characteristics of the innovation ecosystem.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed Perspectives, a Web
security system that can prevent man-in-the-middle (MitM) Internet
eavesdropping attacks. Perspectives also can protect against attacks that
exploit the recently disclosed flaw in the Domain Name System. The
researchers have incorporated Perspectives into a free Mozilla Firefox
extension. Perspectives uses a set of friendly sites, or notaries, to
authenticate Web sites for financial services, online retailers, and other
transactions that require secure communications. By independently querying
the desired target site, the notaries can check to see if each site is
receiving the same authentication information, or digital certificate, in
response. If one or more notaries report authentication information that
is not the same as the information received by the browser of other
notaries, a user would have reason to suspect that the connection has been
compromised. Although certificate authorities already help authenticate
Web sites to reduce the risk of MitM attacks, Perspectives adds another
layer of security and will be particularly useful when visiting sites that
use self-signed certificates instead of certificate authorities.
Perspectives also can detect if a certificate authority has been tricked
into authenticating a fake Web site and warn the user that the site may be
compromised.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Despite recent studies showing that girls are doing as well as boys in
math from grades two through 11, more must be done to encourage girls to
pursue science and technology fields as a career, writes Josephine Cheng,
IBM Fellow and lab director at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Although
outnumbered, women have made significant contributions to computer science.
For example, Grace Murray Hopper invented the first computer compiler in
1952. In 1991, Hopper became the first woman to receive the National Medal
of Technology. One reason why more young women are not pursuing science
and technology careers may be that many people still believe that girls are
not as good at math and science as boys, despite evidence to the contrary.
Many companies, schools, and industry role models are working to change
this perception. IBM, for example, hosts a science and technology summer
camp for girls. A recent camp at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Silicon
Valley Lab was geared specifically toward middle-school-aged girls.
Another effort, Nerd Girls, a club founded by women engineering students at
Tuft's University, is working to dispel negative stereotypes about girls
and technology with the intention of showing that young women can be
athletic, fun, and outgoing while being extremely intelligent in science
and math.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge predicted in a
1993 essay that computer technology would advance so dramatically that a
new form of superintelligence would emerge by 2030, an event he dubbed the
Singularity. He is concerned about some of the potentially negative
effects of such a development, including the possible obsolescence of
reading and the abbreviation of people's attention spans. Vinge envisions
the possibility of intelligence amplification, in which people steadily
increase their intelligence by pooling their knowledge with each other and
with computers, perhaps via a direct brain-computer interface. He also
projects an alternative scenario in which artificial intelligence trumps
human intelligence. He doubts that under such circumstances
superintelligent machines would submit to human control or remain confined
to laboratories. Vinge has been urging people to get smarter through
computer collaboration in order to avoid such a possibility. "I think
there's a good possibility that humanity will itself participate in the
Singularity," he says. "But on the other hand, we could just be left
behind."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The Molecular Programming Project, a collaborative research effort by the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of
Washington, has been awarded $10 million by the National Science
Foundation's Expeditions in Computing program. The Molecular Programming
Project aims to establish a fundamental approach to the design of complex
molecular and chemical systems based on the principles of computer science.
The researchers will develop tools and theories for molecular programming
that will enable a systematic design and implementation in the laboratory.
The researchers say molecular programs could one day be used to manufacture
nanoscale objects, create biochemical circuitry, explore the inner workings
of a cell, and act as "programmable therapies" that can be placed within
living cells to diagnose and respond to diseases. "Our project is a
response to the fact that the molecular systems people are building today
are now so complex, and their behavior so intricate, that future progress
hinges on developing the intellectual and practical tools for mastering
that complexity, the kinds of tools that computer science has already
developed for silicon computers," says principal investigator and Caltech
professor Erik Winfree.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A quantum Internet could potentially harness the properties of quantum
physics to transfer software and data between future quantum computers,
which could outperform ordinary computers by running multiple operations
simultaneously, in superposition. Harvard University's Mikhail Lukin is
confident that a lab demo of a quantum network will be furnished within a
few years. An important step is the creation of a secure common encryption
key by tapping the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which prevents
interference since the act of eavesdropping changes the states of the
entangled particles. Quantum communication becomes more challenging as the
distance between points on a network increases, making the establishment of
an encryption key exponentially slower. Lukin and colleagues have worked
out a scheme for long-distance, quantum-encrypted communication by
producing entangled pairs of photons that are far apart. Long-distance
entanglement at a reasonable speed could be enabled through a method for
storing pairs of photons that have been successfully entangled while other
pairs are still being created, and Lukin, fellow Harvard researcher Lene
Hau, and others generated the first rudimentary quantum memory in 2001.
The most recent quantum memory development involved the capture of two
entangled photon states in an atom cloud and the on-demand release of those
states. Lukin says a practical quantum memory will eventually need to
store data on some kind of solid support.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top